Then there is something altogether different: high-resolution, color video of four distinct armed figures walking out of a house and along the streets of a town. At one stage, the picture suddenly zooms in on two of the suspected militants to reveal that one of them is almost certainly a child, propping a rifle on his shoulder that indicates how small he is relative to the man next to him. The images are so clear that even the shadows of the figures can be examined.

These images “show off a lot of capability,” Thomas Keenan, the director the Human Rights Program at Bard College, said in an email.

“The zooms to very close-up are especially interesting, as is the fact that they do not have to look from directly above,” he added. “This makes it clear, among other things, that they have very little deniability on the ‘collateral damage’ front. They can see in extreme detail and very high resolution.”

Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect who works with Mr. Keenan on the multidisciplinary Forensic Architecture study group — dedicated to the close analysis of spatial evidence for war crimes investigations — added a note of caution. “This footage is taken either very early or very late in the day,” he observed. “Without shadows we could not identify these as weapons at all.”

Since images taken during most of the day will be without such long clear shadows, Mr. Weizman notes, “showing these rare instances could skew our understanding of how much can be seen by drones and how clear what we see is.”

Mr. Weizman added that the long shadows making it easy to see guns in the footage that was provided to the magazine by the Italian military could obscure the fact that images gathered by drones often provide scant evidence that people on the ground are engaged in militant or criminal activity. Most of the footage “that is continuously harvested by drones,” he says, is “far more ambiguous.”

“Israeli drone operators attacked people offloading gas containers for a medical facility thinking the containers were small rockets,” he recalls. “In Waziristan, spades were mistaken for guns. People have been attacked in Pakistan simply for bearing arms.”

“Many American carry arms too,” he notes.

According to L’Espresso, which was granted access to the Italian pilots flying Predator drones over Iraq to identify targets for the American-led coalition, most of this surveillance work is far less dramatic and involves the close study of patterns of behavior over the course of many hours — akin to a kind of “sociological reading from above.”

The drone operators, L’Espresso reports, see very few conventional military targets from their remote-control stations on the ground in Kuwait. There are few tanks or other military vehicles, far more cars and tractors, and few columns of soldiers, mainly gunmen circulating in small groups, mixed in with the civilian population.

“A huge part of drone surveillance is exactly about this: tracking patterns, rhythms, habits, pathways,” Mr. Keenan said. “They are acquiring massive quantities of data this way, both about individuals (who can be individually tracked, as is clear from this footage) and in the aggregate.”

In his book “A Theory of the Drone,” the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou explained that what Pentagon officials call “pattern of life analysis” is often used to “target individuals whose identity remains unknown but whose behavior suggests, signals, or signs membership in a ‘terrorist organization.’ ”

L’Espresso reports that Italy’s Air Force has been flying surveillance drones since 2004, logging more than 24,000 hours of flights over Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa. Last month, the State Department gave final approval for Italy to add armed Reaper drones to its arsenal.

While studying images of daily life in areas controlled by Islamic State militants, looking for targets, the Italian drone pilots have also witnessed what they see as signs of subtle resistance. That includes children playing games of soccer, which has reportedly been banned in some parts of the self-described caliphate as a “diversion from jihad.”